Parking management includes a variety of strategies that encourage more efficient use of existing parking facilities, improve the quality of service provided to parking facility users, and also improve parking facility design. Parking management thus addresses a wide range of transportation issues, while facilitating achievement of a variety of transportation, land use development, economic, and environmental objectives.
Conventionally, parking is managed by issuing a ticket at an entry to a parking lot and having the customer pay before exiting the lot. Payment is typically made via a parking lot ticketing machine. Additionally, ALPR (Automatic License Plate Recognition) of vehicles can be performed at the entry and the exit to a parking lot, which increases the reliability and value of the workflow above and beyond simply managing tickets and payments.
A problem associated with ALPR parking management systems, however, is that they are chiefly based on the use of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technologies, which does not produce perfect or even near-perfect license plate recognition results. Furthermore, maintaining a database of license plate numbers captured via ALPR technologies has raised privacy concerns.